In members’ own words
What it actually did for two of us.
Not scripted marketing. One member reporting his own three-year numbers back to the room, and one talking about what the room did for her when she needed it.
“It’s all the connections that I’ve made that made me grow.”
Xavier Yen
Interior Design (Commercial) · February Interiors
Xavier joined quiet. Soft-spoken, by his own description, with Wednesday morning a slot in the calendar rather than something he did much with. His first year returned him nothing at all. Not a little. Zero.
What changed was taking on a leadership role. It stopped being about his own business and started being about the thirty other people in the room, and he began turning up deliberately rather than just turning up.
Then he did the thing almost nobody bothers with: he tracked it. Three years of what he gave the room against what came back. The second year looked wrong. He had passed more referrals than in his first — twelve against nine — yet the business they were actually worth had collapsed, from close to S$5,000 down to S$858. The conclusion was uncomfortable and useful. The referrals he was handing out were not good enough.
So he changed how he made them. In the third year he passed twenty-four referrals worth S$16,701. And the business that came back to him went from S$0, to S$28,025, to S$56,124.
“My chapter mates would help me read my weekly presentation.”
Deborah Wong
Essential Oils Specialist · Living Essentially Pte Ltd
Every week the chapter asks each member to stand up and describe their business. For Deborah that one routine minute is harder than it is for anyone else in the room. She has a disability, and reading aloud is not straightforward.
So her chapter mates read it for her.
There is no policy behind that, no accommodation process, no committee. Somebody sitting nearby picks up the page. It is a small, unglamorous thing, and it is the most precise illustration on this page of what a room being more like a business family than a boardroom actually means in practice.
From there came joint events run with other members’ businesses, and by her own account a customer base that grew from under fifty people to a team serving several thousand. She gives the full figures in the video.
Asked what she would say to somebody struggling, she does not talk about business at all. “Don’t let what we can’t do stop us from doing what we can do.”
Deborah’s seat in the chapter is now held by her husband, Fabian Tan, who represents Living Essentially. See Fabian in the member list
